Tech & AI News Roundup — October 2, 2026, 7:04 PM UTC

Quick links to what's actually happening in AI, tech, and IT right now — curated from real reporting, not rewritten, so you can go read the full story wherever it's genuinely worth your time.

This Shoe Company’s Instagram Ad With a Frat Is Pissing People Off

A collaborative Instagram post between footwear line HEYDUDE and a University of Florida frat is sparking backlash due to sexual cyberharassment allegations against two former members. — Wired

This new ChatGPT scam tricks you into installing malware – how to spot the trap

This authentic-looking scam starts with a sponsored Google link – and it’s catching people off-guard. — ZDNet

Research roundup: 6 cool science stories we almost missed

Also: Spooky action at the LHC, Ice Age psychoactive use, yeast for building homes on Mars, and more. — Ars Technica

Apple says it’s tightening macOS ‘Full Disk Access’ controls due to new risks from AI agents

Apple says it will add new controls around macOS’s Full Disk Access permission, warning that increasingly capable AI agents make broad access to users’ files, messages, mail, and browsing history riskier. — TechCrunch

OpenAI’s Dot agent is enterprise software that can also order your dinner

New helpful little guy just dropped. | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge It's a tale as old as last week: OpenAI's new agent platform, called Dots, is full of cute little guys who can do your bidding. But unlike the ultra-approachable Meta Muse, Dots feel very much like using workplace software that happens to be able to order you a burrito - emphasis on work. OpenAI announced Dots earlier this w — The Verge

It’s not AI anymore, it’s ‘super intelligence’ (according to the White House)

This week, the White House got nearly every major tech CEO in one room — Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei among them — to sign an AI safety pledge that President Donald Trump called “morally binding.” Trump also signed an executive order officially rebranding AI as “super intelligence,” and meanwhile, Meta and OpenAI are putting friendlier faces on their AI products, even as t — TechCrunch

Breaking up (with Elon Musk) is hard to do

In a throwback to MySpace-style internet drama, Shivon Zilis announced that she and the father of her four children, Elon Musk, had broken up on X. To do so, she quote-tweeted a post from "Big Tech Alert," an account that, among other things, monitors what accounts are following and unfollowing each other. That post noted Musk was no longer following her on X. It was also sponsored by Kalshi, beca — The Verge

GitLab Patches Critical 9.9 AI Gateway Flaw Allowing Command Execution on Self-Hosted Servers

A critical flaw in GitLab's AI Gateway could let a logged-in user with Duo Agent Platform access run commands on the gateway under certain conditions, GitLab said in an advisory. The gateway is the service that connects a GitLab instance to AI models, and only organizations that host their own gateway need to act. The flaw is fixed in gateway versions 19.2.4, 19.3.2, and 19.4.1. The flaw — The Hacker News